Thursday, October 06, 2005

Processing a Paradigm Shift


How would we measure level of computer performance… processor clock speed, of course. Though so many elements go into a standard desktop PC, masses know only the processor, Intel Pentium 4, Celeron 1.4GHz, AMD Athlon 64 bit, etc. But the truth is that megahertz or gigahertz, speed doesn’t matter for CPU performance. Intel was quite reluctant in accepting this fact and AMD foolishly went on fighting its bigger rival on this point.

Despite extensive coverage by the tech media that showed better benchmark performance by slower-speed AMD Athlon 64 processors, AMD itself didn’t realize this golden opportunity to tell a different story to the consumers. Meanwhile if processor speed no longer defines the processor technology, then what does? Intel's own corporate culture probably needs a major adjustment in perspective and its marketing department has a great challenge in doing this paradigm shift!

Multi-core processing is being upheld as the innovative ideal, and the new race, as defined by Intel, is to go multi-core everywhere as quickly as possible. By now, most of us probably would be aware that this topic dominated much of the discussion at the Intel Developer Forum held in city recently.

The technological challenge in achieving higher processor speed, is the heat generated by Intel’s 3 GHz clock Prescott-core P4s. There was a major concern in the industry circles due to the high cost in cooling, electricity consumption and noise. The next generation Xeon multiprocessor from Intel coming out in 2007, is code-named Whitefield, which takes advantage of smaller transistors to advance performance and decrease power consumption. Lets hope this innovation coming out of Bangalore can power the future generation PCs with much less power!

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article266-page1.html

A Chip out of India

Suddenly a biz journalist stumbles on something and he thinks it's the scoop of the year! Heard about this story a while ago during a quiz of our beloved quizzard Avinash Mudaliar. But is this stale news... Please do comment.
A popular statement for industry cynics is, “Whatever maybe the achievements of the Indian IT industry in terms of earnings, there is not much to show for product innovation.” Though there are many good products crying for acclaim, our critics are not much bothered.

In the meanwhile there is a buzz happening in the chip industry that something big is coming out of Bangalore. The next generation Xeon multiprocessor from Intel coming out in 2006, is code-named Whitefield. That’s because it will be the first ever chip built 100% designed in India with its name coming from the IT township on the edge of the city.

Intel recently had put in $41million to build a new processor design center and this project is happening in top secrecy. Intel's secrecy behind Whitefield is not surprising given that the company had been seemingly lag rivals with the design of Sun's Niagara chip getting ready in 2006, so are AMD’s dual-core processors and IBM's Power.

Intel's first 65-nanometer Xeon MP processor, Whitefield, is being built for server platforms, takes advantage of smaller transistors to advance performance and decrease power consumption. Whitefield is a low-power multi-core Xeon processor that places four mobile Banias cores around a shared Level 2 cache. Media reports say that the Intel India's President Ketan Sampat expected a new Xeon to be out by end of 2006 or early 2007.